Urbania

Urbania sits on the upper Metauro, thirteen kilometers downstream from Urbino. The original Ghibelline village was destroyed in 1277 and rebuilt seven years later by the Provençal Cardinal Guillaume Durand, who renamed it Castel Durante. The town passed to the Brancaleoni family in the fourteenth century and to the Dukes of Urbino in the fifteenth, who converted the Brancaleoni fortress into a summer residence and set aside the river island as a hunting reserve, the Barco Ducale, fitted with a small church.

Pope Urban VIII renamed the town Urbania in 1636 after his own name. The centro storico runs along the river, with the cathedral, the Porta Parco and the Loggia dei Mercanti marking the medieval and Renaissance core, while the ducal palace stands apart as the seat built over the old fortress and the Barco as the separated hunting ground across the water. A short walk from the old center, the Chiesa dei Morti holds the mummified bodies moved there once the original graveyard was closed.

Through the sixteenth century the town's maiolica ranked with the work of Urbino and Pesaro, and that production is still carried on today in workshops that keep the same name the town wore before the pope's renaming. A place that changed its name once by papal decree, and kept working in the trade that made it famous under the old one.